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Peace News log archive: February 2014

The Peace News log is a space for reflection, reportage and analysis, by activists from the UK and beyond. It is the blog of Peace News, the grassroots peace movement newspaper. If you have an article that you would like to contribute to the Peace News log, please contact us.

The recent attacks on the community of 10 de Abril is followed by a week of National and International Solidarity.

Following recent attacks in Chiapas, a Week of National and International Solidarity “If they touch the Zapatistas, they touch all of us” has been called, to be held from 16th to 23rd February, 2014, to “denounce the counterinsurgency war” and emphasise that “the Zapatista communities are not alone.”

The new aggressions were made against the iconic Zapatista community of 10 de Abril, by government supporters from the group CIOAC democratic who live in a nearby community, and who have been threatening and provoking the Zapatistas in this area since 2007, with the aim of dispossessing them from their lands. Six Zapatista support bases (BAZ) were injured, three of them seriously, and one is in danger of losing his sight. A shocking attack also took place on staff from a local hospital; when they came to give assistance, they were attacked and prevented from attending to the injured.

Following the historic Zapatista uprising of 1st January, 1994, which transformed the lives of tens of thousands of indigenous people, huge areas of land and territory were reclaimed. Prior to 1994, many people worked their ancestral lands as servants of the landowners who used the lands for cattle ranching, and treated their workers with abuse and contempt. In March 1995, in what became the community of 10 de Abril, the serfs descended from the rocky hillsides to the fertile valley and reclaimed their heritage. They now work their own land again in community as free men and women, growing coffee, corn, beans, vegetables and bananas, and have made part of their territory an ecological reserve.

Two weeks ago in a room in Kabul, Afghanistan, I joined several dozen people, working seamstresses, some college students, socially engaged teenagers and a few visiting internationals like myself, to discuss world hunger. Our emphasis was not exclusively on their own country’s worsening hunger problems. The Afghan Peace Volunteers (AVP), in whose home we were meeting, draw strength from looking beyond their own very real struggles.

With us was Hakim, a medical doctor who spent six years working as a public health specialist in the central highlands of Afghanistan and, prior to that, among refugees in Quetta, Pakistan. He helped us understand conditions that lead to food shortages and taught us about diseases, such as kwashiorkor and marasmus, which are caused by insufficient protein or general malnutrition.

We looked at UN figures about hunger in Afghanistan which show malnutrition rates rising by 50% or more compared with 2012. The malnutrition ward at Helmand Province’s Bost Hospital has been admitting 200 children a month for severe, acute malnutrition - four times more than in January 2012.